Italy

April 19, 2013

**** Image A Sound Astarring John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Headeyscreenplay by Charles McKeown and Liliana Cavani, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmithdirected by Liliana Cavani

by Walter Chaw When
I heard that The Night Porter auteur Liliana Cavani
was adapting one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley novels, I knew to
expect something more in line with René Clément's brilliant Purple
Noon than Anthony Minghella's lavishly simpering The
Talented Mr. Ripley. What I didn't anticipate was that this
film, which never received any sort of domestic theatrical distribution
before being summarily dropped, supplement-free, onto the home video
market, would be one of the best of its year--indeed, of its kind. Ripley's
Game is doomed to the "direct-to-video" label and an
ignominious eternity buried in the Blockbuster shelves for the
occasional stunned bemusement of the well traveled and the John
Malkovich fetishist--it languishes there while over-masticated tripe
like The Alamo finds its way to thousands of
screens, its lingering impact to remind again that the slippery slope
in Hollywood's distribution game just got steeper. Ripley's
Game would have looked great on the big screen--and some
genius robbed us of the opportunity to see it that way, thinking we'd
prefer American Splendor or Along Came
Polly.

by Walter Chaw Though he's best known for The Bicycle
Thief, Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. is, to my mind, the superior film, and ultimately one of the few pictures I've ever revisited from
the era of Italian Neo-Realism--a movement I've never particularly understood nor,
indeed, liked. It's possible that there's not much to understand, that as a
reaction to the execution of Mussolini and during that brief "Italian
Spring," Italian cinema, freed by necessity from the studio and looking to
present a more authentic representation of the country's broken cities (film critics
were to blame for the movement, of course, as they would later be for the
French Nouvelle Vague), found non-professional actors to play out social melodramas. I wonder if I've always bristled at the notion that the
Giuseppe De Santises and Luchino Viscontis produced during this time were
anything like "realism" as I understood it; when I was first introduced to American films noir, I had no idea they were
as stylized as they were because of an attempt at "realism," too.
Whatever the case, I see Umberto D. as something like an early
Fellini, like La Strada or even 8½: There's something that feels very much like a humanistic solipsism at its
middle. Which is so much more interesting than the cries for social equality that
inevitably turn to plaintive keening in my ear. Sometimes liberals damage their
own cause--long-held close-ups of crying children have a way of doing that.

by Jefferson Robbins Slasher movies are concerned with not just murder, but
with its root cause--not motive, really, but motivation. There has to be a
detonator, or else stalker-horror is what its most strident critics accuse
it of being: all body-count, no brains. The films have leeway to be less
concerned with motive than, say, those Ustinov-as-Poirot adaptations, where the
whole cast learns whodunit while seated for tea and cakes in the third act. (I
sort of miss those; I wish "mystery" hadn't been usurped by
"thriller" in the moviemaking lexicon, and in part I blame Jonathan
Lynn's 1985 Clue.) But they have to successfully allude to a trigger
point, some match to the killer's keg of gasoline.

by Walter Chaw It's hard for me to reconcile the Dario Argento of the Seventies through to 1982's Tenebre with the Dario Argento ever after (at least until what I've heard is a remarkable comeback, the upcoming completion of his Three Mothers trilogy). The inventor almost by himself of two distinct genres of film in Italy (and just the concept of the arthouse slasher in the world), a co-writer of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, and a revolutionizer of horror-movie music became this guy who stopped aping Hitchcock and started aping...Jeunet? Himself? Even with Max Von Sydow in the fold (Non ho sonno), the pictures post-Tenebre are cheap auto-knockoffs devoid of innovation and lacking the amazingly imaginative gore that marked Argento's early gialli, the archetypal resonance of his supernaturals, or the transcendent, sometimes sublime lawlessness of his hybrids (like Suspiria, for instance, still a towering achievement). They're almost to a one these gaudy, derivative, exhausted pieces of shit.

by Walter Chaw Italian horror master Dario Argento's desperation for a critical or popular success is starting to manifest itself in self-imitation and sloppiness. Fourteen years removed from his last good movie (Opera), his latest film Sleepless (a.k.a. Non ho sonno), starring the inimitable Max Von Sydow and heralded as a return to Argento's roots in the giallo genre, hits North American shores months after bootleg copies of it have already circulated amongst the ranks of disappointed fanboys. Sleepless lacks the savant-level spark of invention that elevates Argento's best films (Deep Red,Suspiria, Tenebre) and the flashes of brilliance that indicate his second-tier of work (Phenomena,Opera, Inferno). It is listless and painful, with fakey gore and dialogue that reaches nadir even for an auteur never known for his pen.

by Bill Chambers Sanity and fatigue are ineluctable corrupting influences on an aging filmmaker, but it brings me great pleasure and no small relief to be able to report that while Mother of Tears: The Third Mother--Dario Argento's long-gestating conclusion to his "Three Sisters" trilogy--is neither as artful as Suspiria nor as dreamlike as Inferno, it nevertheless surpasses expectations fostered by Argento's recent work to emerge as his best movie in decades. Fitting that Argento should choose to tell the Rome-set story of Mater Lacrimarum last, marking this as a homecoming in more ways than one.

September 3, 2012

by Angelo MureddaReality, Matteo Garrone's follow-up to the urban planner's nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little
thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a
finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan
crook who dreams of being a contestant on "Big Brother". Luciano is
played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia
hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide--unlike his
modest fictional counterpart, who's involved in a baffling scheme to resell
pastry-making robots on the black market. It's a terrific performance, somehow
sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it's the reason Reality works as well
as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.

by Angelo Muredda When SIGHT & SOUND announced the long-awaited results of their 2012 critics poll earlier this month, the Internet was abuzz with the shifting fortunes of Citizen Kane and Vertigo--the flip-flop heard 'round the world. Less noted was the latest demotion of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, which debuted at a startling second place in 1962's poll (the film was only two years old at that point), then steadily declined with each decade before landing at number 21 on the most recent survey. What to make of this seemingly calamitous downward shift? Probably not much. Like fellow countryman Federico Fellini, who's also been increasingly received as a curio despite the continued respect for 8½ (particularly among directors), Antonioni's canonical films are stamped by their era; L'Avventura's downgraded fortune likely says as much about the limited shelf life of European modernism--which its cool classicism and intellectual rigor so fully embodies--as it does about the film itself.

by Bryant FrazerBarbarella begins in the fur-lined cockpit of a space-faring starcraft, fabulously appointed with a statue of a moon goddess and, inexplicably, what looks to be a full-sized replica of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. Despite the high-flown frivolity of its conception and the infectiously groovy theme song, this tableau does not represent the most quintessentially with-it of all possible sci-fi worlds. That changes when the astronaut who has floated into view starts pulling off the different panels of her moon-suit to reveal, underneath the shapeless layers of scuba-like gear, a naked strawberry-blonde with slender, delicate fingers and legs that don't quit.

by Bryant Frazer When Django, the title character and hero of director Sergio Corbucci's seminal spaghetti western, first appears on screen, he's slogging on foot through mud, dragging a coffin behind him. The image is evocative and challenging. In classic American films, western heroes had generally been dignified cowboy types saddled up on strong horses. They were lawmen or simple ranchers with a code of honour. They rode into town in a cloud of dust and plainspoken righteousness backed up by a sharp eye and a six-shooter, and they stood for the endurance of traditional values on a wild frontier.

by Walter Chaw Dropping us in the middle of Italian slum Scampia, itself smack dab in the middle of nothing, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (Gomorra) is the Hud of gangster flicks, all deglamourized, harsh, expressionist stripping-away of illusions and idealism to reveal the gasping, grasping emptiness underneath. Like Hud, the source of that idealism is years of cinema supporting a romanticized iconography: the American western in Martin Ritt's film, the collected works of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese in Garrone's peek inside the ways of this thing of ours. Unlike Hud, there's no intimation of a "happy" ending for the sociopaths of Gomorrah--no feeling that for whatever the cost to a normalized (idealized?) existence, the outcasts and opportunists living their lives in imitation of Tony Montana are doomed to their tough-guy surfaces and the anonymous deaths predicted for them during a brutal prologue. Non-narrative and populated by a non-professional cast of locals and unusual suspects, the picture, however steeped in naturalism, is finally a formalist piece about as free of structure as Sartre--and every bit as meticulous. This "No Exit" (and the French title of Sartre's play fascinatingly translates, when applied to a discussion of a film, as "In Camera") and its unlocked oubliette is Scampia: The players in organized crime are imprisoned there by choice, trapped by the validation they desire from one another.

by Bryant Frazer There's a tradition among purveyors of BDSM pornography to append a coda to their project in which the participants in various potentially-alarming scenarios are finally glimpsed, all smiles, revelling in the afterglow of a clearly consensual exercise. I assume this custom has very practical benefits--for one thing, it might help stave off prosecution for obscenity or sex-trafficking. But it's also a signal from the community making the videos to the community watching them that the performances are undertaken with high spirits, lest there be any misunderstanding about the actual circumstances of their making. Despite any apparent unpleasantness, dear viewer, all involved (top and bottom, dominant and submissive) are working towards the ultimate goal of pleasure, not pain.

by Bryant Frazer It sounds like a grand old time, all right. First, there's that title. Killer Nun. Adjective noun, conveying irony and promising subversion. Then there's the cast. How can you not want to see Anita Ekberg star with Joe Dallesandro in a killer-nun movie? And the premise (dope-addled sister at a convent hospital starts abusing patients) does not disappoint--imagine a season of "Nurse Jackie" under showrunners Dario Argento and Abel Ferrara. Yet somehow, director Giulio Berruti blows it: A derivative slasher pic and an only mildly lascivious sex film, Killer Nun is the sort of sleepy-eyed misfire that could give nunsploitation a bad name.

by Bryant Frazer It's feeding time for the monsters again in director Aldo Lado's 1974 quasi-giallo1Night Train Murders, which sees the young and lovely Margaret and Lisa (Irene Miracle and Laura D'Angelo, respectively, making their film debuts) cross paths with violent criminals while travelling overnight by rail from Germany through Austria to Italy. The stage is set as Pacino-esque stickup man Blackie and his harmonica-blowing sidekick Curly (Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi) mug an alcoholic sidewalk Santa Claus in Munich's Marienplatz. Menace! With that kind of element loose in the cities, why would two girls choose to ride some skeevy midnight train into Italy instead of opting for a sensible air flight? From one mother to another, via telephone: "Planes are never on time these days."

August 28, 2011

originally published September 21, 2009Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

Vincere (Win) (d. Marco Bellocchio)Structurally and even editorially, the oddly-titled Vincere (Win) is kind of a mess, but the badass opening scene hooked me. Therein, a slender, dark-eyed journalist with a good head of hair--you guessed it: Benito Mussolini--sets a pocket watch and gives God five minutes to strike him down; if he's still alive when time runs out, Mussolini (Filippo Timi) tells the pious crowd gathered before him, it means there is no God. I really wanted to like this guy, but the movie's about his mistress and alleged other wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who has the sort of face you can lose yourself in), whose story pretty much precludes any chance of that. Ida bears Mussolini a son and sells all her worldly possessions to subsidize his fascist newspaper, but as soon as his political career starts to gain a little traction, he has her exiled and eventually institutionalized. (Benito Jr. (Timi again) is committed as well once he reaches adulthood.) I'm not sure what the movie's out to prove, other than that Mussolini was a fucking fuckhead, but it's hard not to feel a subversive tickle during the fairly-graphic sex scenes between he and Ida, which reduce Il Duce in the act of giving him human urges. As much as veteran director Marco Bellocchio wants to honour Ida's Snake Pit ordeal, he does seem a little wistful about the aesthetics attendant to her ruin. Indeed, Inglourious Basterds might be the second-most cinema-fetishistic war movie I've seen this year, and it's hard to deny the strange enchantment of a war hospital tableau in which religious silents are projected onto the ceiling to placate the wounded. ***/4